2008
The Bird Collector: Ridgefield’s 300th Anniversary Exhibition
July 29 to September 7, 2008
The Aldrich has mounted several exhibitions dealing with the subject of birds—painted, sculpted, stuffed, even living—over the course of its exhibition history. To help celebrate the 300th anniversary of Ridgefield’s founding, the Museum will exhibit a major work by artist Bill Barrette, The Bird Collector. Commissioned by The Aldrich in 1999 and currently in the collection of the Ridgefield Historical Society, The Bird Collector celebrates Edward J. Couch, an amateur Ridgefield taxidermist who a century ago assembled one of the most significant collections of mounted birds native to New England. Barrette’s work recreates Couch’s impressive collection, as well as revealing the fascinating biography of one of Ridgefield’s most interesting citizens.
Image: Bill Barrette, The Bird Collector (detail), 1999
Video A
August 10 to December 7, 2008Exhibition Reception: September 14, 2008; 3 to 5 pm
The Aldrich will debut Video A to exhibit short contemporary video projects. The first installation will feature two films—Miguel Soares: Jumping Nauman and Letha Wilson: Nova Scotia Car Drive—that approach the idea of “mapping” the landscape from radically different perspectives. Wilson’s video places the viewer in the driver’s seat as the possible options of a car ride unfold and multiply, using time as the constant. The video concludes in unison as each route ends in the same location. Soares’s video utilizes Google Earth—an Internet application that provides access to satellite imagery, maps, terrain, and 3-D buildings based on pinpoint searches—to visit all fifty-one places where American artist Bruce Nauman exhibited his work in 2006.
Image: Letha Wilson, 16 possibilities for an 8 minute car drive (Shelburne Nova Scotia) (video still), 2005
Peggy Preheim: Little Black Book
August 10, 2008 to February 8, 2009Exhibition Reception: September 14, 2008; 3 to 5 pm
Best known for her exquisitely rendered pencil drawings, Peggy Preheim also creates figurative sculpture and photographs. Her sculptural assemblages feature white clay figures and found objects including furniture, doll’s clothes and Victorian glass. Her atmospheric black and white photographs are based on her sculptural work. At the core of Preheim’s work is her drawing; small-scale, tightly rendered work that explores highly nuanced imagery related to memory, sexuality, aging, and the complex inner relationship of childhood to adulthood.
This exhibition will be the first museum exhibition to fully explore the wide range of Peggy Preheim's work. Preheim's work is included in the collections the
Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney, amongst others.
Image: Peggy Preheim, White Buffalo, 2002
Paul Ramírez Jonas: ABRACADABRA– I Create as I Speak
August 10 to November 30, 2008
Exhibition Reception: September 14; 3 to 5 pm
Paul Ramírez Jonas has consistently utilized pre-existing texts, including not only the written word, but also others as diverse as a walking trail and sheet music, in the service of creating new art. Ramírez Jonas’s exhibition, entitled ABRACADABRA, which translates from the ancient Aramaic language as “I Create as I Speak,” will include an interrelated group of works that assert an interactive contract with the public, where one must give in order to receive. The exhibition will include a penny-press machine that the public will be encouraged to use to rewrite the text found on the common U.S. penny. Playing off the familiar belief that coins thrown into water help silently spoken wishes become reality, the 20-foot-high moon image reflected in Ramírez Jonas’s pool will have been created by repeatedly typing “I Create as I Speak” on 616 pieces of paper to be pinned to the wall in a grid.
Image: Paul Ramírez Jonas, Penny Press Designs, 2008
Huma Bhabha: 2008 Emerging Artist Award Exhibition
September 14, 2008 to February 8, 2009
Exhibition Reception: September 14, 2008; 3 to 5 pm
Primarily a sculptor, Huma Bhabha creates work that combines traditional materials such as clay with chicken wire, Styrofoam, old car parts, and debris. The resultant figurative objects simultaneously reference Egyptian, Greek, and Indian sculpture, while recalling modern and contemporary works by Alberto Giacometti, Philip Guston, and Anselm Kiefer.
Image: Huma Bhabha, Bumps in the Road, 2008
Karin Davie: Symptomania
September 14, 2008 to February 8, 2009
Exhibition Reception: September 14, 2008; 3 to 5 pm
Karin Davie is a New York-based artist whose recent abstract paintings are an exploration into the physical and psychological nature of the “body” in painting. Her work explores the intersection of representation and abstraction through process, memory, and gesture. Davie is interested in the performative nature of painting and the use of the artist’s body in creating a painting. This physicality, echoed in the most recent work, is evident in hyperbolic and distorted curvilinear forms.
Image: Karin Davie, Symptomania no. 1 (from Symptomania series), 2008
Lars Fisk: Trashbags
September 14, 2008 to February 15, 2009
Exhibition Reception: September 14, 2008; 3 to 5 pm
Lars Fisk has transformed a single 5,500 lb. block of black marble, into a sculpture inspired by a pile of four heavy-duty twist-tie trash bags. The life-size sculpture, which stands 63 inches tall, references the visibility of garbage found on city streets and will be installed by the main Museum entrance. The practice of defining folds in the plastic began as an exercise in reductive classical sculpture and became a stonecutting preoccupation for the artist. The pile of bags represents a paradox of everlasting disposability, addressing the issue of waste and the underlying question of its permanence. Lars Fisk has exhibited extensively in the United States and is currently a project manager at Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City.
Image: Lars Fisk, Trashbags, 2008
Full Circle: Ten Years of Radius
November 28 , 2008 to May 31, 2009Exhibition Reception: December 14, 2008; 3 to 5 pm
This exhibition will feature work from the first ten years of Radius: Emerging Artists from Connecticut and Southeastern New York , a professional development program for regional artists, which is jointly organized by The Aldrich and the Ridgefield Guild of Artists. Curated by Regine Basha from Arthouse in Austin, Texas, the exhibition will present a selection of recent works produced by alumni of the program.
Image: Paul Favello, Bomb Sequence 2 Aerial Schematic, 2006
Kwang-Young Chun: The Soul—Journey to America
December 14, 2008 to May 31, 2009
Exhibition Reception: December 14, 2008; 3 to 5 pm
Noted Korean artist Kwang-Young Chun makes fantastically intricate sculpture out of the recycled pages of old Korean books printed on mulberry paper. He wraps the handmade paper around Styrofoam tetrahedrons and other geometric forms that serve as the basic units of his compositions. The forms are then arranged in free-standing three-dimensional sculptures or mounted on the wall as two-dimensional low-reliefs. The artist will be producing his largest free-standing work to date—over fourteen feet high—for presentation in The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum’s Project Space. The Soul—Journey to America will travel to the University of Wyoming Art Museum following its Aldrich Debut.
Traveling Exhibition
2009
Alejandro Diaz: New Work
March 8 to May 31, 2009
Exhibition Reception: March 8, 2009; 3 to 5 pm
Alejandro Diaz uses humor to draw attention to culturally embedded racial stereotypes. He creates artwork that capitalizes on the viewer’s ability to laugh at him/herself and the absurd aspects of our culture. For his project at The Aldrich, Diaz will create an installation of nuns playing baseball. The origins of this incongruous juxtaposition lie both in actual figurines of baseball-playing nuns that his grandmother owned and in his experiences as a young boy; two of Diaz’s aunts were nuns and he attended Catholic school. The exhibition explores freedom and the effort to reverse stereotypical perceptions by the idea of adults—and more specifically nuns—at play.
Image: Alejandro Diaz, Rendering for Aldrich installation, 2008
Robert Lazzarini: Guns and Knives
March 8 to May 31, 2009
Exhibition Reception: March 8, 2009; 3 to 5 pm
Robert Lazzarini's Guns and Knives will continue the artist's exploration of the reconfiguration of objects through the use of compound planar and sine-wave distortions. This installation will feature a series of .38 Smith and Wesson revolvers and a cluster of kitchen knives, addressing repetition of the single object and variation within the group. Lazzarini will subject the Leir Gallery walls to subtle transformations, activating not only the sculptural figures, but also the visual ground. The installation will create an immanent space, emphasizing the artist’s interest in phenomenology and physically seeing. The works become a meditation on fear and violence, contrasting reductive display with charged subject matter and its inherent rational and irrational aspects.
Image: Robert Lazzarini, Gun, 2003
Type A: Barrier
June 21 to August 30, 2009
Exhibition Reception: June 21, 2009; 3 to 5 pm
The collaborative team Type A (Adam Ames and Andrew Bordwin) makes work about boundaries—real and imagined. Their new project, Barrier, presents twenty-four identical concrete sculptures in the form of “Jersey Barriers,” dividers originally designed for highway medians, but adopted after 9/11 as security barricades for public buildings. Type A’s barriers differ from the originals in that each is a perfect semi-circular curve, so six form a circle, or, put end to end, a sinuous line. The Aldrich installation will bisect the entry terrace, lobby, and inner courtyard, radically changing the flow of traffic. Barrier is a collaboration between The Aldrich, The Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, and the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY.
Traveling Exhibition
Image: Type A, Barrier (digital rendering of 2009 Aldrich installation), 2008
Gerard Hemsworth: New Work
June 21 to August 30, 2009
Exhibition Reception: June 21, 2009; 3 to 5 pm
The English artist Gerard Hemsworth, currently professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London, will mount his first solo museum exhibition in the United States at The Aldrich. The work in the exhibition of new paintings will have the familiarity of storybook pictures, but explore what he calls “the politics of representation” and consciously “reassert a reflexive relationship between art and its audience.” Central to his work is the concern that the normative values within visual language are subject to fracture by the potential of the mind to transform images. Hemsworth has exhibited extensively in South America and Europe.
Image: Gerard Hemsworth, Neighbours, 2002
Tom Molloy: New Work
June 21 to August 30, 2009
Exhibition Reception: June 21, 2009; 3 to 5 pm
Tom Molloy is an Irish artist whose work engages with global events, particularly America’s place in the new world order. With economical means, the artist manipulates found materials and images to explore the multivalency of symbols. With surgical precision, Molloy operates on potent emblems to excise hidden motives and overlooked correspondences that resonate through recent history. This exhibition will include sculptures, drawings, and photographs created by the artist during the last five years, as well as a new work made especially for The Aldrich Museum’s camera obscura. The exhibition is curated by Joseph R. Wolin, an independent curator and critic in New York.
Image: Tom Molloy, Map, 2004
Edward Tufte: Seeing Around
June 21 to August 30, 2009, in the galleries
June 21, 2009, to April 2010, in the Sculpture Garden
Exhibition Reception: June 21, 2009; 3 to 5 pm
Edward Tufte is primarily known for his revolutionary books about the visual communication of data and information. In parallel with his writing and design career has been a growing engagement with both sculpture and landscape design. This exhibition, which will be his first major museum project, will focus on sculpture and its relation to the landscape, utilizing both the Sculpture Garden and the Museum’s Project Space Gallery. Tufte has written seven books, most recently Beautiful Evidence, which received Business Week’s award as Best Innovation and Design Book for 2006. He is Professor Emeritus at Yale University, where he taught courses in statistical evidence, information design, and interface design.
Image: Edward Tufte, Tong Bird , 2008
Paying a Visit to Mary: 2008 Hall Curatorial Fellowship Exhibition
September 27, 2009, to February 2010
Exhibition Reception: September 27, 2009; 3 to 5 pm
Paying a Visit to Mary comprises work by both emerging and more established artists in a broad range of media, including performance, film, painting, sculpture, and installation. The exhibition explores a significant subject in current artistic practice: personal narrative and contemporary storytelling. Constructed as a ”call and response“ between different voices, Paying a Visit to Mary forms a romantic, conceptual, and highly specific story of our time and our present human condition. The exhibition is seen as a conversation amongst the participants and the audience.The exhibition will be curated by Maxine Kopsa, from the Netherlands, the second recipient of the Hall Curatorial Fellowship.
Publication Available
Image: Emily Wardill, Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck, 2007
Jeanne Finley and John Muse: The Slow Lapse of Days and Months
September 27, 2009, to February 2010
Exhibition Reception: September 27, 2009; 3 to 5 pm
The Slow Lapse of Days and Months is a site-specific video installation by the collaborative team of Jeanne Finley and John Muse. Utilizing multi-screen video projections, the exhibition explores three profoundly different ways of keeping time, using the real working lives of three contemporary Ridgefield residents: a dog groomer, an arborist, and a guitar instructor, played off the lives of two local historical figures: a hermit from the eighteenth century named Sarah Bishop and a wandering vagrant from the nineteenth century known as ”the Leatherman.“ Finley and Muse have worked together since 1991. This will be their first major project in the northeast.
Image: Jeanne Finley and John Muse, The Vagabond Planetarium, 2008
Jo Yarrington: New Work
September 27, 2009, to February 2010
Exhibition Reception: September 27, 2009; 3 to 5 pm
Connecticut artist Jo Yarrington will transform the Museum’s Leir Atrium to replicate a human eye by installing floor-to-ceiling, full-color transparencies of photographs taken of the inside of her eye. Yarrington will also utilize the Museum’s only permanent fixture, the camera obscura, for the optical project.
Image: Jo Yarrington, Rendering for Aldrich installation, 2008
